It was a gift book, presented to me by the pastors that I had been teaching in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.\u00a0 \u201c100 Reasons to Love the Cardinals\u201d was a book about my favorite baseball team, the St Louis Cardinals.\u00a0 I read it on the flight back home.\u00a0 When we landed, I put the book in my overhead luggage, but when I arrived home, the book was missing.\u00a0 I looked everywhere.\u00a0 I knew I had placed the book in my luggage, but it was not in there.\u00a0 Lost!\u00a0 Maybe I just thought I put it in my luggage. A week went by as I grieved over the missing book. Then, one evening, my wife walked into the den carrying a book and asked, \u201cIs this your book?\u201d It was.\u00a0 My lost book had been found.\u00a0 Apparently, it fell out of my luggage as I was unpacking and landed under the bed. My wife saw the edge of it from the hallway and found it. It reminded me of a favorite chapter in the Bible \u2013 often called the \u201cLost and Found Chapter.\u201d\u00a0 In Luke 15, Jesus shares three parables: (1) The lost sheep \u2013 a man owned 100 sheep, one wooly little critter wandered.\u00a0 The Shepherd went looking and found it, then called the others and celebrated; (2) The lost coin \u2013 a widow lost one of ten coins. She turned the house upside down until the coin was found, at which time she called friends and celebrated; (3) The lost son \u2013 a man had two sons (could have been daughters just as well).\u00a0 One wandered; one stayed home. The story ends with a celebration.\u00a0 I had always read (and preached on) these parables with emphasis on lostness, but when my lost book was found, I celebrated. \u00a0My sermon just got longer . . . and better.<\/p>\n
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It was a gift book, presented to me by the pastors that I had been teaching in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.\u00a0 \u201c100 Reasons to Love the Cardinals\u201d was a book about my favorite baseball team, the St Louis Cardinals.\u00a0 I read it on the flight back home.\u00a0 When we landed, I put the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monday-morning-manna"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3217,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3216\/revisions\/3217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/discipleallnations.org\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}